Costs must drop for environmental cases

The government needs to make legal action more affordable in environmental cases to comply with the Aarhus Convention on citizens’ environmental rights, a new report concludes. The report, Ensuring Access to Justice in England and Wales, compiled by an independent working group on access to justice in environmental matters, looked at whether current law and practice prevent individuals and groups from achieving access to justice in environmental matters. It concludes that for most people and NGOs, current rules about costs— particularly potential exposure to costs if an application fails—are inconsistent with the Aarhus Convention. It requires that access to effective judicial mechanisms is “fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive”.

At the report’s launch Mr Justice Sullivan, who chaired the working group, said: “While the Administrative Court is capable of dealing effectively with environmental law challenges, that is of limited practical value in protecting the environment if only the very rich or the very poor can afford to use the court’s procedures.” Daniel Lawrence, chairman of the UK Environmental Law Association, says: “This is a thorough report, which includes a comparison of how things works across Europe, and the UK seems to be lagging behind.”